Written about 380BC, Plato's Republic is still our blueprint for thinking about the relationship between justice and the state. But who exactly is the "philosopher king" that Plato envisages? Did he really advocate infanticide? And who will "guard the guardians"?

In the latest episode of The Big Ideas, Benjamen Walker talks Plato with philosophers Mark Kingwell, Mark Vernon, Julian Baggini and Guardian writer Charlotte Higgins.

This piece has just gone up at the Guardian's Cif...

Is it just me or has the dialogue between science and religion become a bit stale? I thought as much recently while taking part in a conference on the debate. We were all so well defended in our respective corners – atheists, believers, agnostics. It seemed highly unlikely that what anyone said would seriously unsettle anyone else.

The smart and articulate apologists for theism were easily able to accommodate the challenges materialist science throws at faith. The smart and articulate atheists seemed content to accept the limits of the scientific worldview and not really be challenged by the insights of theology.

Something similar troubled me when I was asked to write The Big Questions: God for the series from Quercus (and indulge me if I add, out this week). Many of the contemporary big questions in theology arise from the impact of modern science, so could I find anything new to say? Well, I did find some new names to read, and while not often cited, I think they might yet find that their time will come.

One was the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His place in the history of science is secure, having discovered that human beings possess an intermaxillary bone. Animals had long been known to possess this anatomical feature of the jaw. But in Goethe's day, there was a lively science-and-religion-type dispute as to whether human beings did too. The leading anatomist Petrus Camper denied it and further argued that this demonstrated that human beings were different from animals. Eventually, though, Goethe's research won the day.

It proved to be no trivial discovery but inspired the concept of homology, the study of anatomical features across different species. This proved crucial for Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. We have four limbs because our fish ancestors had four fins, and so on. What is interesting to reflect on now, though, is the means by which Goethe did his science.

His trouble with Camper alerted him to fashions in science – fashions that scientists find difficult to shake off because their reputations are likely to have been secured by those fashions. He was also convinced that good science embraces a subjective as well as objective dimension. This is because what scientists see in the natural world depends upon what they are prepared to contemplate seeing. He was prepared to contemplate the human intermaxillary bone. It demonstrated to him that imagination matters as much as investigation.

By imagination, Goethe meant something more than practical ingenuity or empirical creativity. He meant the capacity to discern the living world in all its aspects. Materialism, for example, does not. It treats the living world as a dead mechanism.

Annie Dillard explores the implications in her essay Teaching a Stone to Talk. She describes a man called Larry who is trying to listen to stones speaking. It seems mad but, Dillard asks, is not that hope what secretly drives the scientific impulse? Meteorologists record the wind's speed, but were they drawn to science because once they also heard the wind's cry? Geologists assess the age of stones, but do they sometimes also hear them "shout forth praise"? "What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab?" asks Dillard. "Are they not both saying: Hello?"

Popular science routinely trades on this sense of nature's aliveness. If you saw Brian Cox's TV series Wonders of the Universe you may recall how images of the cosmos were accompanied by the rising swell and celebratory trumpets of orchestral music. In fact, the producers received a number of complaints from viewers about the music being too loud. They could not hear Cox explain the hard science as he wistfully gazed heavenwards. And yet, you could be forgiven for concluding that the music was more important. It spoke more loudly and clearly to the meaning of being made of stardust. The music interpreted the physics for us. It made the stones speak. That is the sound we wanted to hear.

Another writer who has explored the power of the imagination in our engagement with the world is Owen Barfield. A philologist, he was fascinated by how words change their meaning over time. Take a word like "literal". Today it means straightforward or on the face of it. But when Saint Augustine, for example, wrote The Literal Meaning of Genesis, the last thing he read was that the world was created in six days. Literal then meant the true meaning, which could only be discerned by struggling with the text, as you might a poem.

The flattening out of the word "literal" is just one instance of a trend that Barfield detected across modern English. He proposed that it is tied up with materialism's mechanistic worldview. It flattens our imagination, thereby also deadening our experience of connection and meaning. Unlike our ancestors, we struggle to hear the stones speak.

Barfield argued that we need to recover our full imaginative capacities if we are deeply to know that the world is alive. Matter, he believed, would then be seen for what it once was, as an expression of spirit. ("Matter" is linked to "mater", or mother, remembered in the expression, mother earth.) This might not be so difficult to achieve because, actually, we experience it every day. When you perceive the matter called a human being speaking, you spontaneously know those perceptions as one person communicating with you, another person. You do not have a theory of other minds, as some philosophers have proposed, driven by a flattening scientistic ideology. We know such matter as spirited people – as souls, you might say.

The paradox that Goethe highlights is that materialism understands itself to be the champion of empiricism, when really it detaches us from the world as we experience it, in the name of objectivity. "All theory, dear friend, is grey," he wrote. "But the golden tree of actual life springs ever green."

Perhaps then, this is the problem with the contemporary dialogue between science and religion. Theology has felt obliged to secure a place for itself broadly within the materialist worldview, sensing its main task is apologetic. But perhaps the time is coming for thinkers to be braver, to push for a truer contemplation of nature, one that knows its aliveness, its spirit. Goethe and Barfield, to name just two, offer rich, imaginative resources.

I have this feature in The Tablet this week.

Fundamentalism, fanaticism, fights. Headlines in the press often cast religion in a bad light. In fact, the evidence suggests otherwise; all in all, the practices of faith tend to have positive effects on people’s lives.

The impact has been assessed across a number of metrics. For example, the likelihood that an individual will drink excessively or take drugs decreases significantly if they go to church, temple or mosque. Among Americans – where religiosity has been extensively studied – being actively religious means you are less likely to commit crime, get divorced, commit suicide or suffer from depression. You will probably also be healthier and live longer.

The upbeat message sounds clearly in posi­tive psychology too, the discipline known as the science of happiness. Martin Seligman, the US psychologist who has put positive psychology on the map, argues that lasting levels of happiness can be influenced by changing your life. “Becoming religious” is in his top five things to do. These results are echoed by the economist, Professor Richard Layard, who advised the last Labour Government on well-being. In his 2005 book, Happiness: lessons from a new science, he presented evidence that having no faith had a more detrimental impact on happiness than losing a job, though not quite as bad as being widowed.

It reads as if the science was designed for advertising God. But the evidence becomes more complicated when a further, crucial question is asked. Just why is it that religion has positive effects? A range of possibilities are mooted, and hotly contested.

A first possibility assigns efficacy to the proscriptive character of religion. World faiths carry moral weight, which is to say that they encourage, if not insist, that faithful adherents do not do things like take drugs, commit crimes and practice infidelity.It is certainly the case that commandments, in the form of “thou shalt not”, are important. They set a tone, help sustain attitudes. But, as any honest believer will testify, commandments are often honoured in the breach. So the question needs to be asked: how it is that proscriptions ­actually work, in so far as they do?

The story of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous is illuminating. In 1931, the psychologist Carl Jung was trying to treat an alcoholic, though Roland H’s craving for drink remained stubbornly strong. Then Jung had an idea. He recommended that Roland attend the meetings of an evangelical Christian movement which stressed submission to God. It worked. Roland had a conversion experience, which Jung interpreted as releasing a new source of energy from his patient’s unconscious, one more powerful than the desire to drink. Roland related the experience to another apparently hopeless alcoholic, Bill W, and it worked for him too. He founded AA, which today has more than two million members in 150 countries.

Research on the effectiveness of the 12-step AA programme is disputed. But it seems undeniable that the recognition of a “higher power” was crucial to the success it has had. In other words, proscriptions work not when they are perceived as persecutory commandments but rather when they are perceived as charting a path to a new way of life.

Speaking personally, I have a friend who regularly attends AA meetings, though he is not a churchgoer. But the language of conversion makes eminent sense to him. He pointed me to the literature of Narcotics Anonymous, which expresses it well. “For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority: a loving God as he may express himself in our group conscience.” And yet, this only points to another knotty issue in the debate. It has to do with the significance of groups.

An alternative possibility to prohibitions being the secret of religion’s success is that individual well-being is boosted by the social support provided in groups – and not just religious groups, but family groups, common interest groups or therapeutic groups. Could the group aspect be what helps people at AA meetings and benefits people who go to church? As the psychologist Oliver James recently noted in The Guardian: “It is … plausible that the comradeship and feeling of belonging supplied by religious peers are a substitute for the buzz you get from substances.” James conceded, however, that social support does not provide an adequate explan­ation. He cited a large-scale study that tracked the lives of thousands of Americans and concluded that community was not a substantial mediator of inner strength.

There are other possibilities. Richard Layard has suggested that the benefits of religion have little to do with prohibitions or sociality but, rather, the issue is emotional habits. He argues that religious practices train individuals to control their feelings.

In his book on happiness, Professor Layard discussed The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, noting how the saint sought to nurture several attitudes that modern science has demonstrated are essential for well-being. Ignatius urged his readers to praise God, that is, to learn to be grateful. He believed that humankind was made to serve God, which had the effect of dissolving egoism by drawing attention away from yourself. As Layard also pointed out, Ignatius argued that salvation involves being indifferent to what happens to you, so while everyone has times of desolation, it is also the case that such experiences tend to pass. This too can help, by building resilience.

Resilience is a theme that interests Eric Greitens, an American humanitarian and social entrepreneur currently researching the virtue. Early indications of his work suggest that individuals who demonstrate resilience in the face of life’s difficulties cannot simply bounce back because their harsh experiences become part of them. Instead, they are able to live with the distress in such a way that they can ascribe meaning to it. The experiences do not demean them, but deepen their sense of being human.

Again, this is an attitude embedded in spiritual traditions. Julian of Norwich lived through the Black Death, one of the most devastating plagues in history, and yet she was still able to write, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Many of the researchers in the positive psychology field are searching for ways of reformulating such religious attitudes for a secular age. They exhibit a desire to raid religious traditions for their wisdom, while removing the theological scaffolding that has traditionally supported them. One of the most articulate recent attempts is found in the latest book by philosopher Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists, published earlier this year. In it, he agrees with the positive psychologists that religious practices provide useful techniques for everything from building humane communities to tending attitudes of kindness.

But reading de Botton’s book crystallised in my mind something crucial about religion that is overlooked. It will come as no surprise to believers that this something has to do with God. Positive psychology is characterised by its instrumentality. Alain de Botton puts it explicitly: “Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.” What he misses, is that religions are good at building community and nurturing kindness because, paradoxically, they do not aim directly to do either. Rather, they aim to open adherents to that source of life, or spiritual sustenance, that is expansive of our humanity. They offer practices that, over time, transform the soul. It is variously called salvation, eternal life or enlightenment.

Goodwill and well-being may follow. They also may not. But when they do, they are happy by-products of the main task, which is not actually to have a successful life. It is to come to know God. The spiritual dimension has instrumental effects; but without the vertical striving, religious virtues come to feel empty. To whom are you expressing gratitude for life if not God? The blind mechanisms of evolution? Or, it might be noted that you do not become religious in order to be happy, and if you tried to do so the strategy would fail you.

It is striking that atheistic writers and researchers are coming to a new appreciation of religion. Going are the days when faith could simply be written off. Nonetheless, I suspect that their ideas will flounder because a basic and obvious question is being avoided, though as Oliver James remarked, it is one “no researchers have ever posited”. Might human well-being actually have something to do with God?

A new series of The Essay begins on BBC Radio 3 this evening with the title The Case for Doubt. I'm kicking it off with political doubt. Here's what I've to say:

In the spring of 399 BC, Socrates drank the hemlock and died. For most of his long life, he had been fortunate enough to live in a democracy. Athens had been an ideal home for a man whose trademark was to ask simple but unsettling questions. If what Plato tells us is right, he would ask politicians whether they really knew what they were talking about when they promised their fellows the good life. It turned out the politicians did not. Worse still, they believed their own rhetoric and were ignorant of their ignorance.

This troubled Socrates. What future for democracy, if it rested on such self-delusion? He felt it was vitally important to admit that the human condition is one of profound uncertainty, deep doubt. We are in between creatures. On the one hand, we are not ignorant and un-self-aware like most other animals. We can learn much. But on the other hand, we are not omniscient and all-seeing like the gods.

This is why the lust for certainty is a sin, as a former Archbishop of York put it, because certainty demands the eradication of doubts and imagining you are a god. Forget that life is enveloped not just by known unknowns but unknown unknowns and you will fall like Icarus from the sky.

Socrates became a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, which is to say someone who sought with a passion to understand what he lacked. He was unlike the politicians in that he knew he was ignorant about many things. It was for this reason that the Delphic oracle had declared that no-one was wiser than he. Wisdom can tolerate doubt.

A few of his fellow citizens took to this message. But it seems that most did not. It is not comfortable to have your ignorance exposed in the marketplace, where Socrates loitered with his unnerving questions. It is not pleasant to feel that being human is like treading water in oceans of untold depths. They said that speaking to Socrates was like being stung by a ray. Others saw him coming and darted down a side street to avoid an encounter.

And in 399 BC it finally came to a head. The first democracy found its greatest son guilty. The freedom to explore the uncertainties at the heart of human life was too much. The citizens lost faith in their new political adventure and in themselves.

I think the word faith is the right one to use, because to be able to doubt requires a kind of faith. It is the faith which tells you that tolerating doubt is worthwhile because amidst the anxieties of ignorance and uncertainty, something useful and valuable will be found. Faith might be defined as the capacity to see that doubt is troubling and meaningful.

To put it another way, a dislike of doubt in politics implies a loss of faith in politics. This does appear accurately to characterize our current condition, given falling membership of political parties and polling evidence on the widespread distrust of politicians.

This is a troubling problem for democracy, because democracy depends upon the goodwill of the people. When faith departs and doubts grow, crisis will follow. Government buildings will have to be surrounded by barricades and police, as has been seen in modern day Athens. Worse, a democratic deficit can become a political crisis from which tyranny may follow. Socrates’ death can be read as symptomatic of such a wobble. In the decade or so before his death, the young democracy had been overturned twice by oligarchs.

Mistakes can be made in responding to this predicament. One is to try to make up for this lack of faith, this not-doing-doubt, by pretending it doesn’t exist, by a kind of force of will. You see it exhibited in the faux-certainty of some political leaders. They affirm absolute confidence in their colleagues, until they are absolutely clear the colleague must go. No-one believes them.

Alternatively, you see the pretence that doubt doesn’t exist when politicians turn to the flaky certainties of evidence-based policy, as if the education of children or the rehabilitation of criminals could be decided by scientific fiat.

The scientists know that their research comes hedged with doubt. But then, there’s the headline. ‘Red wine causes cancer.’ ‘Pre-school children are too stressed.’ The researchers must bury their heads in their hands. I don’t think there is much mileage in apportioning blame either. Candidates include the media, which has a severe intolerance of doubt, deepened by the 24 hour news cycle.

Or you might point a finger at the welfare state. The argument here is that an advanced welfare state, such as our own, unwittingly nurtures a litigious culture by over-promising on what it can deliver. Someone, somewhere should pay the price for what is, in truth, a humdrum risk of death in life. Or it creates an environment of suspicion in which it is thought that someone, somewhere is in the know about the perils of, say, avian flu. Something must be done.

But again, calls for action easily mutate into demands for certainty, where certainty is not to be had. Doubt-intolerance grows.

A better strategy may be to accept that doubt is a perennial problem for democracies. It was there at the start, with the death of Socrates. He was a victim of democracy’s group psychology, and groups are notoriously unable to bear doubts.

Eighty years after Socrates, Plato’s pupil Aristotle felt the force of that truth. Nationalistic Athens was whipped up again, this time by the democrat and orator Demosthenes, and Aristotle found himself on the wrong side. He left, going into self-exile, because he understood the logic of crowds. He didn’t want the Athenians to commit a crime against philosophy twice.

So much for the dark side. What more positively to do?

It is worth reflecting on the fact that doubt becomes more palatable when sweetened by good humour. Wit allows us to face the unknown with less fear. Sigmund Freud thought that jokes work by converting anxiety into pleasure. He recalled the jest made by the criminal being led to the gallows. It happened to be a Monday morning and so the villain cracked, ‘Not a good start to the week.’ He died more at ease, with a smile. Socrates too is remembered for his irony. When he was asked what he thought might be a suitable punishment for his crimes, he replied, free meals for life.

To put it another way, Freud continues, humour eases doubt because it releases the energy that feeds the fear. ‘Look here!’, the joke says. ‘This is all that this seemingly dangerous world amounts to. A jest.’ It’s not really true, but for a moment we can feel safer and in that moment maybe learn something lasting about our feelings about doubt.

Satire is certainly part of a mature, democratic society – and it not only pokes fun at those with power. It aids citizens too. It prompts us not to demand faux-certainties from the powerful. It reminds us of their limitations and our own.

To achieve this double effect, it has to be performed in the right spirit - a spirit that prompts we citizens to reflect on ourselves as well has have a laugh at our masters. If satire only mocks the mighty, it may leave us with the comfortable delusion that the mighty are all to blame. If it makes us feel uneasy too, amidst the belly laughs and chuckles, then that might be because it is true to a degree at least, that we get the politicians we deserve.

On occasion, horror and calamity happens. Where there is doubt there is also the real possibility of mishap, error and failure. In the political sphere, Enoch Powell nailed it when he said: ‘All political lives… end in failure because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

But there is hope in his remark too, for it seems to me that there are different ways of failing. One is to fail badly, raging and seeking revenge. The politician who fails in this way will rush to write self-justifying memoirs, instigate scorched earth policies as they leave office, or perhaps place a letter on the desk of their successor noting that there’s no money left.

But there is a good way of failing. I don’t mean a stiff-upper lip kind of failure that grins and bears it. Rather, it’s the good failure that paves a way for what follows.

It’s a subtle attitude, though one well understood in child psychology. The British paediatrician, Donald Winnicott, argued that a mother must fail her child in order that the child can make its way in the world. A perfect mother, who anticipated and fulfilled her child’s every need, would actually be a tyrant. Conversely, the primary-carer of a child must not fail the child too deeply or too often. If that happens, it suffers what Winnicott called impingements – experiences that leave the infant feeling under mortal threat, as if life itself might fail them.

It’s a balance, which Winnicott summed up in the useful phrase, the good-enough mother. The good-enough primary carer fails their charge well, so that the young child discovers a sense of its own agency, its own self. The psychotherapist, Andrew Samuels, has proposed that this might be a handy notion to deploy in politics. In his book, Politics on the Couch, he argues that we need good-enough politicians. They will fail us because that is what politicians do, that is what life does. However, they might fail us well, so that as citizens their failure can encourage us to discover our agency, to be empowered – like the young child.

We might re-write Enoch Powell. It is not just that all political lives end in failure. Rather, the greatest political lives, knowing they will fail, strive to fail well so that others might live more bravely and better.

There would be benefits if voters could feel that they needed good-enough, not perfect politicians. It might curtail the poisonous cycles of doubt in politics – the apportioning of blame, the demand that something, anything must be done. It might lessen the idealization, when the politician promises the world. And then also the inevitable denigration, when the politician is subsequently belittled for failing to deliver the impossible.

The good-enough principle could be applied to the welfare state too, and the litigious culture that it risks nurturing. A health system that was good-enough would be there for us when serious impingements threatened. And it would also equip us to face up to the uncertainties of life and death. Similarly, an education system that was good-enough would ensure that all children had the basics. And it would also foster the energy, curiosity and pleasure that empowers the child to take the risks that lead to a deeper self-education too.

This might seem fantastical given our punishing political culture today. What politician would survive the mockery of the press were they openly to aim to be good-enough?

And yet, Andrew Samuels continues, perhaps there is a way to do it. What the good-enough politician might cultivate is not delusions of omnipotent power, the certainties that know no doubt. Instead, they could cultivate the energy inherent in the kind of politics that equips others to pioneer change. Such leaders position themselves as catalysts.

It is striking that this kind of politics copes well with doubt. In fact, uncertainty and failure appear to instill only more resolution and faith. Think of environmental politics. Failure presses in on every side, as talks collapse and international meetings fall apart. And yet, every setback renews the energy, inspires more creativity and imagination.

It might be in these arenas that we find lessons in the kind of politics with the faith to face life’s doubts, with the faith to tolerate uncertainty. What they have achieved is a rediscovery of soul. They manifest a kind of political spirituality, in the environmental case shown as a deep respect, a sense of the sacredness, of the earth. This generates a felt sense of aliveness - and so a well-resourced commitment, in spite of it all. Doubt is before us. Though in truth it always was. We are the in between creature. To live well with doubt is to do well at being human, as Socrates tried to teach those first democrats.

I've a piece in this week's The Tablet on David Cronenberg's film about Freud, Jung and Spielrein - A Dangerous Method - thinking particularly about the meaning of the relationship between Jung and Spielrein, presumed sexual in a hanky-panky kinda way. A taster:

Such experiences have been called ‘profane spirituality’ by Andrew Samuels, the Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex. His touchpoint is Jung’s analysis not of sexual pursuits but alcohol abuse. Jung argued that alcoholism is a ‘spiritual quest that had gone off the rails,’ Samuels explains...

‘There is no birth of consciousness without pain,’ Jung wrote in an essay penned when he emerged from his creative illness – though with that darkness, or shadow, comes the promise of life. Jung later proposed that great spiritual innovators tread similar paths too, finding inspiration from their own confrontations with the unconscious. According to tradition, the Buddha was tempted by the daughters of the demon Mara, a story that Jung interpreted as conveying Siddhartha Gautama’s hard won insight into his psyche. Jesus of Nazareth was driven into the wilderness and confronted the forces that approached him there. That which would have destroyed his ministry he faced to resource it.

More generally, it might be said that sins are forgiven not to be forgotten but so that the individual might be freer to understand their deeper meaning for him or her, ‘to recognise the realities of the human psyche’, as Christopher Jamison puts it in Finding Happiness. The strategy of facing inner hatred, envy, lust and anger can be traced back to the early desert fathers. Jung re-describes the process for our psychologically-minded age. The shadow is fearful and disturbing, but makes for spiritual development and openness to the numinous.

He once asked why the injunction to care for those who trouble us in the outer world should not apply to what troubles us in our inner worlds. ‘That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ – all these are undoubtedly great virtues,’ he writes. ‘But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself – that these are within me.’ We should not condemn this fiend but converse with him and discover his message for us.

I was in conversation with Simon Glendinning at the LSE on friendship last week.

There's a podcast online now, here.

This piece on love, human and divine, has just gone up at the Guardian's Cif Belief...

There is a long tradition in Indian religion that links human and divine love. Kama, as in the Kama Sutra, is India's Eros. Firing arrows of flowers, he made Shiva, the god of destruction, fall for Parvati, a tender consort. The myth speaks of how the aggressive and nurturing urges in the human psyche might be united. The life of the gods is our life too.

Related themes are touchingly portrayed in the miniature paintings called ragamala, which feature in a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London. They have a similar appearance to medieval book illuminations. Richly coloured, conveying a dream-like, archetypal feel, some show gods in icon form. Others convey intimate narrative scenes of devotion.

Ragamala imagery is also inspired by the musical modes known as raga. Each mode has a unique feel. One is bright and uplifting. Another, dark and melancholic. Each picture is a visual representation of the emotional mood associated with a raga. Though their precise function is contested amongst scholars, it seems fair to assume that listening to the right mode, or contemplating the right image, deepens insight. They offer a meditative, aesthetic therapy.

The most accessible ragamala in the exhibition reflect on the theme of love. We see a female lover walking in parkland, and then conversing quietly with an older and presumably wiser confidant – or perhaps a guardian angel. In one, she longs for her beloved. In another, she seeks shelter from the storms of passion.

Similar erotic themes are central to the Platonic theology of the Christian traditions. Again, the ups and downs of human love are imagined as a shadow of Eros's deepest longings: union with the divine. Or think of the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible. The different chapters in the story of human love can be taken as allegories of the spiritual quest. The woman in the ragamala is a lover and a human soul too.

The deployment of psychological moods to cultivate insight was a major theme of the Renaissance. Writers extensively explored the links between sound and soul, colour and spirit. "I often resort to the solemn sound of the lyre and to singing to raise the mind to the highest considerations and to God as much as I may," wrote the humanist philosopher, Marsilio Ficino.

Modern music therapies revive the tradition. In a recent article for the Lancet, Professor Martyn Evans explained that "when music works upon us therapeutically, it expresses, recalls, and even rekindles general features of our embodied experience and of our ordinary being." It nurtures "bodily and psychological fluency and vitality," he continued, adding: "[and tells] of our place in the universal order of things."

Love is more important to Christianity than reason or learning, writes Christos Yannaras, a leading Greek theologian. To be a believer is to embark on an erotic adventure because God is a "mad lover", he ventures. The human soul rises to the divine in the passion of ecstasy – passion being the operative word, as the journey is one of pleasure and pain because it necessitates a stepping out of yourself, an ek-stasis.

"The thirst for life is implanted in our very nature, in each tiny fold of our existence," Yannaras explains, in On the Absence and Unknowability of God, "and is an unquenchable thirst for relationship, that is to say for the reciprocity of self-abandonment and self-offering." Falling, as when falling in love, speaks of the collapse of the walls with which the individual protects him– or herself, though also isolates him– or herself too.

So also the spiritual struggle. The Sufi poet, Rumi, was another influence on the tradition of the ragamala and advised this: "Tend within to the opening of your heart." There's a message for Valentine's Day.

This piece has gone up at the Guardian, as part of a supplement in today's paper, Make The Most of Your Time:

The modern mind is inclined to think of the past as gone. Archaeologists dig the ground for it; others try to hold on to it with photos. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there," reflected the writer LP Hartley.

But isn't the past entirely present? Contemplate, for example, the deep past of our evolutionary inheritance. We have four limbs because our prehistoric ancestors did. We sing much like whales and birds, melodically speaking, thanks to the creatures that first strove to communicate with music.

Of course, novelty emerges in evolution too: we humans have opposable thumbs and Mozart. But appreciating this deep past can awaken Gaia-like solidarity and connect us more profoundly with the origins of life.

Another source of our selves is historical, in the culture and family that shapes us. Here the past may feel less comfortable to contemplate, for such factors highlight another dimension – the way the past can constrain us. Your family links you to particular people and places. You might have moved to an anonymous city or left the country of your forebears to escape such ties. You might desire a future free of the past. The past can feel wearisome or even frightening in a culture, like ours, that is inclined to sell dreams of being who you want to be, regardless of the past.

In truth, though, that is a delusion. As William Faulkner remarked: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Further, it is when you attempt to turn your back on the past, and expend all that energy trying to ignore or delete it, that it becomes a drain and a burden. Paradoxically, it is then that you cannot put it away.

However, there is another way of thinking about the past; to consider it as a resource, one that's tailored precisely to you.

A better model for a happier relationship with the past might be the life of the artist. Their first task is to accept the constraints of their medium, the limitations of paint or the mere 12 notes of the scale. Only then can something wonderful occur. They develop a voice, they find a mode of expression. They become someone.

So with us too. The origins of our lives lie in the past. But this also means that the past is life's gift to you, painful though it can be. It is only within the constraints of life – having four limbs, singing a particular song, being of a time and place – that we can live, be transformed and free. The past is actually what makes us someone too.

This piece has just gone up at the Guardian's Cif Belief...

There is a crucial element missing from Julian Baggini's Heathen's progress, his careful sorting of the differences between an atheistic and religious stance towards the world. It has to do with the body. Not only is the body fundamental to any understanding of religion but helps, I suspect, with some of the issues that have recurred in Julian's discussions; matters like the relationship between belief and practice.

To get at the issue, take a step back and consider a couple of strands of contemporary research. They draw links between our bodies and how we know ourselves and the world.

The first comes from cognitive science, or rather, a radical questioning of cognitive science as it has been construed. A diverse group of philosophers and scientists are now arguing that the dominant 20th-century view of cognition, as a capacity of brains or minds, is inadequate. The alternative is often called embodied cognition. It examines the evidence that our bodies play a vital role in how we engage with the world. According to this view, bodies are not just life-support systems for the brain or sources of sensory inputs. Rather, bodies are integral to human thought.

For example, it is noted how people use hand gestures when reasoning. "On the one hand," you might gesticulate, "But on the other hand too." It is proposed that we toy with possibilities in this way because the body enables us to symbolise complexity. As a result, we are able to hold on to ideas that a brain in a vat, or dare I say an analytical philosopher, would dismiss as incompatible. Bodies enable us to live in a cognitively richer world.

Then there are other researchers asking why Google is still so stupid. One answer is that, although vast databases feed the online search engine, it lacks one crucial thing. A living body. And this makes all the difference.

Try asking Google whether it is foggy outside. Nonsense is returned, though it's a simple question for us. We intuitively know about inside and outside, having an inside and outside of our bodies. We spontaneously look out of a window. In short, it seems that bodies are crucial for making the world a meaningful place too. (Conversely, a common feature of schizophrenia is not to have a clear sense of the inside and outside of your body. Commonsensical meaning departs. What's inside and outside becomes confused and alarming.)

Or again, there is the evidence coming out of neuroscience, so brilliantly discussed in Iain McGilchrist's book, The Master and His Emissary. It shows that the right hemisphere of the brain has far more neural connections with the body than the left. The result, when engaged, is a capacity for broad attention, drawing new links, and remaining open to the unknown and unexpected. Conversely, the left hemisphere only grasps what it knows. It is very good at being focused. It loves delivering the products of reason and is wary of imagination and affect, you might surmise.

All this chimes with research into human development too. Here, it seems increasingly clear that what we take to be true or false, trustworthy or doubtful, is first and foremost an activity of the body.

The story begins young, very young, when an infant – a word that means "without speech" – is trying to make sense of the world. A wide range of studies suggest that it does so by what it takes into its body and what it rejects. Good food is deemed good because it nourishes the child both physically and psychically. When a child turns away from the bottle or breast, it is not only having trouble feeding but trouble trusting too.

This early experience looks like it provides a grounding for adult convictions, an echo of which is carried in our language. Hence, when you don't trust some belief, you will resist being "taken in" by it, like the infant who didn't take in the food. Alternatively, when you have a strong conviction, you might say that it becomes "part of you", like nourishing food. "Drink the waters of wisdom", invites the Psalmist. He was not deploying a metaphor.

Hold on to those thoughts, and consider a second area of research, now historical. The insights here revolve around the beginning of the modern period, when a profound shift occurred in the way the body and belief were conceptualised.

One crucial moment was the discovery of the circulation of the blood in the 17th century. After that, the body was regarded as a closed system. Doctors became increasingly preoccupied with infection and contagion, what should and should not be allowed into the body. This clearly makes great sense in terms of medicine. But it has knock-on, epistemological effects too.

Consider, say, the tradition of British empiricism which developed at the same time. It deploys a similar logic in that it is sceptical about what comes into the body via the senses. That "data" must tested to see whether the beliefs it implies can be allowed to inhabit the mind. Similarly, knowledge that can claim objectivity, a validity independent of the body, comes to be valued more than subjective knowledge, which is gained by introspection, turning inwards.

The upshot is that the modern sceptic is suspicious of subjective convictions. They fixate on the many ways in which individuals can be self-deluded, and forget that they can also be wonderfully discerning. They miss truths that can only be known by acquaintance, which is to say, by letting them in.

Alternatively, the modern atheist may admit that going to church can be tremendous and saying prayers valuable to cultivate thanks. But they will ensure that these activities remain contained – quarantined, you might say – by interpreting them as of strictly aesthetic or instrumental merit. They must not be allowed to become processes by which the individual becomes porous to the divine.

The new cognitive and historical insights have further implications for the understanding of religion. For example, if religious narratives are to do with seeking patterns of meaning and a holistic view, the spiritual searcher will gain most from embodied ways of engaging with life. I suspect that this is why meditation can be so revelatory. It trains the attention towards aspects of embodiment like the breath. It exercises neurons that people never knew they had. Expansiveness is the result.

Or again, if a religious sensibility needs an embodied foundation, this would explain why spiritual directors advise individuals to make pilgrimages, to experience liturgies and rituals, and to discipline and pattern their lives. These are activities that are about letting go, which is also a letting in. Something opens up to a new experience of life. Illumination is gained. Faith known first in the body may be the result.

Of course, that faith may well seek creedal expression too, though reason best serves the experience, discerning and deepening it. "Excarnation" as the poet Yves Bonnefoy has called it, is "wrong-headed religion."

So, it is this embodied dynamic that, for me, Julian's reasoned articles have missed. As Pascal had it, the heart has its reasons. The new research appears to be confirming that the old insight is quite true.